Bruce Trigger

Bruce Graham Trigger (June 18, 1937 – December 1, 2006) was a Canadian archaeologist, anthropologist, and ethnohistorian. He was appointed the James McGill Professor at McGill University in 2001. Born in Preston, Ontario (now part of Cambridge), Trigger obtained his undergraduate education at the University of Toronto earning a B.A. in anthropology in 1959. Trigger received a doctorate in archaeology from Yale University in 1964. He was taught by George Peter Murdock and Benjamin Irving Rouse. He was co-supervised by William Kelly Simpson and Michael D. Coe. He became friends with K. C. Chang, a Chinese archaeologist, who joined the department during his final year of his PhD. His doctoral work was funded by a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Award. His PhD thesis, entitled "History and Settlement of Lower Nubia," argued that four principle parameters determined the density of Nubia over 4,000 years: the height of floods, agricultural techniques, foreign trade and wars. He spent the following year teaching at Northwestern University and subsequently took a position as assistant professor, with the Department of Anthropology at McGill University in Montreal, and remained there for the rest of his career. He was married to Dr Barbara Welch, a British geographer trained in Physical Geography, who, despite being less-known than her husband, was considered an equally sophisticated thinker. Pamela Jane Smith writes in her obituary of Bruce Trigger that "It is little known outside Canada that Bruce had a deep and profound influence on the development of archaeology in his homeland and is seen as one of the great Canadian intellectuals along with Harold Innis, Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan." Bruce Trigger contributed to a wide range of fields and wrote on many aspects of archaeology. He published over 20 books including the book "A History of Archaeological Thought" which became required reading in the discipline.